Yet another Call to Undefined Function help request

Hi all, PLEASE, don't just toss the e-mail... I think I have a unique enough situation to warrant this e-mail. First, I have searched the mailing lists for the answer to my problem. I have also tried to find the answer through the documentation, but have been unsuccessful. Mailing lists are always my last resort. Here's the situation. I have an *old* Cobalt Raq appliance with Apache 1.3.20 and an older version of mysql on it. I have a customer that wants to use a database on his website, and rather than update this old, unsupported appliance and possibly break something, or go through the hassle of moving this customer with 100+ e-mail addresses to a different server, we have installed a new, dedicated mysql server to use system-wide for any of our customers, and ourselves, to use as a db server. This seemed like a good idea at the time, and I think it will work well once we figure out the bugs here. Now, everything was going swimmingly, until we tried to access the db with php on a web page (which is where we got the call to undefined function). It was an old version of php, so I thought I'd upgrade, not as scary as upgrading all three pieces of software. No resolution there. I compiled it with mysql support, but still get the undefined function error. Now, on the new db server, phpinfo reports a whole section on mysql. On this older server, there is no mysql section in phpinfo. I can log in and access the databases remotly from the Cobalt server using command line mysql; I would like to try this at cli using php but don't know how. I am obviously missing something and I can't find the answer anywhere, other than "reinstall apache, mysql, and php", which is kind of scary on a server this old that is running as well as it is. Not only that, but my ego is kicking in here and I would really like to understand what the problem is rather than just reinstalling everything... That just seems too M$ to me. Any suggestions? Thanks, Alex